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Deploying a fully converged network

Challenge

A federal agency with nearly 300,000 employees, and hundreds of medical facilities and benefits offices across the U.S. turned to WWT to deploy a converged infrastructure solution (network, compute and storage) quickly and efficiently. Due to its sheer size, the customer faced compliance and standardization issues as well as operational challenges. To be effective, the agency needed compute and storage infrastructure standardized across multiple regions to eventually move to a fully virtualized environment. Customer requirements also mandated a centralized management and reporting solution for both storage and compute nodes that could be leveraged across the environment.

Solution

WWT offered an unsolicited proposal to deploy a hybrid FlexPod solution that incorporated both NetApp storage and Cisco UCS server and network components. WWT’s converged infrastructure solution provides a ready platform for quickly providing medical centers with a virtualized server environment. WWT followed up with a series of technology briefings, demos and proofs of concept for the agency’s senior engineering team to educate them about the proposed solution. WWT positioned Cisco UCS Central and NetApp Unified Manager to provide the organization with real-time reporting and alerting on all compute and storage nodes. This enabled centralized management of assets, system wide alerts, report generation and immediate issue remediation.

A total of 193 hybrid FlexPods solutions were custom assembled within WWT’s North American Integration Center in St. Louis. The units were staged, shipped and then installed at select medical and data centers within six months, meeting a nine-month customer requirement.

Conclusion

WWT provided a turnkey solution that fully met the agency’s requirements. The customer was able to increase operational efficiencies significantly due to a standardized infrastructure and is now poised to move to a fully virtualized environment. This will allow the agency to scale cost effectively as it grows.